About Ken Masugi

Ken Masugi, Ph.D., is a senior fellow of the Claremont Institute. He has been a speechwriter for two cabinet members, as well as for Clarence Thomas when he was chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Masugi is co-author, editor, or co-editor of seven books on American politics. He has taught at the U.S. Air Force Academy, where he was Olin Distinguished Visiting Professor; James Madison College of Michigan State University; the Ashbrook Center of Ashland University; and Princeton University.

In Leviathan (1651), writing about the state of nature as war, Thomas Hobbes famously noted: “For War consisteth not in battle only, or the act of fighting, but in a tract of time wherein the will to contend by battle is sufficiently known….so the nature of war consisteth not in actual fighting, but

Henry Olsen is in the front rank of American political analysts. His involvement in practical politics plus the depth of his scholarship allow him to see and grapple with questions other conservatives overlook. His spiritedness and defiance of conventional thinking earned him a regular column at American Greatness, where his insights should be

The often desperate measures foreigners take to enter our borders—crossing deserts being packed into trucks, and surviving unspeakable brutalities—rightly provoke our anger and evoke our pity. Because of the pathos involved in this kind of illegal entry, we often overlook the fact that there is a far safer and common way for would-be

This week marked the 154th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address and it reminds us that the liberty we enjoy has purposes that transcend the things we desire for ourselves. Biblical, philosophic, and political yearnings join in American public life. Our sacrifices, our duties today, unite us as Americans to the heroes of 1776,

Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 satiric novel about a fascist takeover, It Can’t Happen Here, has made a furious comeback at the expense of the maligned Donald Trump. That it is an act of supreme political ignorance for anyone to think Lewis’s novel somehow foreshadows the rise of Trump has not prevented such ignorance from manifesting

A recent West Point graduate, still serving in the U.S. Army, shocked admirers of the venerable American military academy with his candidly pro-Communist views. How could such an institution, founded on “duty, honor, country,” produce such a student? A junior Army officer who states his anti-American opinions so openly may seem novel, but

President Trump’s press conference in Puerto Rico made clear that whatever the island’s political designation may be, Puerto Ricans are Americans and he will act accordingly. The Commonwealth’s recovery—and not just from this hurricane—is part of the goal of making America great again. But the difficulties involved extend far beyond differences in political

“I’ve listened to countless speeches in this hall, but I can say this: None were bolder, none more courageous and forthright than the one delivered by President Trump today” –Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu The wisdom of President Trump’s United Nations speech last week was nothing less than a demonstration to that dubious

Following some elite campus visits with his daughter, the morose father lamented that one cannot simply opt out of college. Such a defiance of convention did not seem feasible socially or economically. Like all men of sense, he is among those flabbergasted by former Princeton President Woodrow Wilson’s eagerness to make his students

Amid the turbulence of the past few weeks, it has been President Trump who has kept his head while others have lost theirs. Trump may be the one man in America who can detoxify racial relations—I mean actually do it, not exploit them in the mode of Black Lives Matter or Al Sharpton.